​DraftIRELAND AND THE BIG LIE [Blog 7 April 2018]I was thinking about ‘the big lie’ – a ploy relied upon by politicians most recently in UK by Brexit campaigns (leave/remain) and earlier, before the US presidential election, and repeatedly since then by the execrable Trump and his duped disciples. Currently both UK and Russian governments are disputing and arguing by way of ‘the big lie’ (viz. ‘we’re right, you’re wrong’) regarding which of them, if either, is responsible for the life-threatened predicaments of the (allegedly) poisoned retired spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. [And I wish both a speedy return to ‘good health’.]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal )Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) to the rescue with a reliable definition:“A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."IRELAND’S BIG LIESThe big lie has always been a dependable ally of Irish political charlatans in their lust for power over the rest of us. In Ireland, our big lie predated Hitler’s drivel by several decades. It currently proclaims: NorthernIreland’s political, social and economic problems are down to the British connection: Irish unification is the only answer. Currently one Irish political party bases its entire policy platform (“A United Ireland by any and all available means”) on that big lie. The remaining parties, or ‘gangs’ as I prefer to think of them, including those elected to Dail Eireann, i.e. the Oireachtas or legislature of the Irish Republic (Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour, Solidarity-PBP, Independents 4 Change, Social Democrats, and independents) live in the complex, real world of 2018 et seq. The remaining elected representatives (you know who you are) wrap themselves in the mummifying blanket of that big lie, attached to, depending upon and viewing their world through its distorting lens.SINN FEINI’ve wondered long and hard about why they cling unquestioningly to this mythical cure all for Ireland’s ills. One obvious reason is that Sinn Féin [SF] - for that’s what they call themselves: it translates, appropriately as “Ourselves”, or even “Ourselves Alone”- the political voice of a failed, and now (we’re told) dissolved, violent revolutionary gang of assassins, do not know when they are beaten. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_Fein) again to the rescue, tells us what we, who survived the 30 years plus of Irish slaughter by PIRA and other equally murderous ‘loyalist’ killers (1966-1998), already know only too well:“Sinn Féin is the largest Irish republican political party, and was historically associated with the IRA, while also having been associated with the Provisional IRA (PIRA) in the party´s modern incarnation. The Irish government alleged that senior members of Sinn Féin have held posts on the IRA Army Council. However, the SF leadership has denied these claims. The US Government has made similar allegations.“A republican document of the early 1980s stated: "Both Sinn Féin and the IRA play different but converging roles in the war of national liberation. The Irish Republican Army wages an armed campaign... Sinn Féin maintains the propaganda war and is the public and political voice of the movement".That ‘propaganda war’, included use of a variation of the big lie, when Sinn Féin’s then national chairman Mitchell McLaughlin’s (2005) agreed with the arrogant, contradictory and nonsensical assertion, articulated on RTE, the Irish national broadcaster:‘that the IRA was “the only legitimate government of Ireland”’.Multiple sources accessed, including on 8 April 2018 at: https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/mitchel-mclaughlin-claimed-jean-mcconville-s-murder-was-not-a-crime-1-6517640To conclude with a cupla vignettes, illustrated by newspaper reports, discussing how two now middle-aged former IRA volunteers, and SF members/supporters, cope with the wretched legacy of their violent revolutionary roles in ‘the war of national liberation’.NICKY KEHOEThe above named petitioner recently engaged in widely publicised defamation litigation in Dublin, Ireland. I shall simply repeat here some of what ‘The Irish Times’ (published online 15 February 2018), an Irish newspaper of record, reported about Mr Kehoe. A former IRA volunteer, who was jailed in 1974 for possession of firearms, Kehoe received a 12 year sentence of imprisonment for attempted kidnapping in 1983 during which gunshots were exchanged with members of An Garda Siochana, the Irish police service. “When [it was] suggested he [Mr Kehoe] could not now pick and choose which parts of the IRA campaign of violence he supported and which were OK, Mr Kehoe replied: “I would say most or all the campaign was wrong for violence, it was wrong that people were killed”. He agreed that while he saw his activities in the historical context, the vast majority would see it as criminal. Mr Kehoe agreed that the 1,196 people killed by the IRA during that campaign never got to do things he had . . . Asked was he proud of his activities in the IRA, he said: “No. I would not be proud”. When counsel asked: “Are you ashamed?” he replied: “I would be, in a context” (“The Irish Times”, 15 Feb 2018).

Kehoe’s statements were unprecedented. For a currently active Sinn Fein member like Kehoe to concede that the IRA’s serial killers (1970-1998) were criminals represented a major shift in that duplicitous political gang’s attitude to the past behaviour of their paramilitary partners during “the war of national liberation”.By contrast, a former “senior” Sinn Féin national chairman and past elected representative (Mitchell McLaughlin) refused to acknowledge that the PIRA's controversial killing of a mother of ten young children, Jean McConville, in the early 1970s, was a crime, as he claimed it had taken place in the context of political conflict (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4186887.stm). This represented Sinn Féin’s deployment of the big lie (i.e. it’s OK to kill as long as it’s for our political cause) to escape responsibility for murder. Politicians from the Irish Republic, along with the Irish media, strongly attacked McLaughlin's comments in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_Fein).To my knowledge, no Sinn Féin or PIRA member, other than Kehoe, has yet publicly acknowledged their shame regarding their involvement, directly or indirectly, in PIRA’s 30 year killing spree. In the next paragraph, a second former PIRA volunteer’s self-reported behaviour and his attitude to it, is summarised. It represents the lamentable outworking of a variation of a Mitchell McLaughlin-type big lie that appears to facilitate a good night’s sleep for this flawed individual.

ROBERT MCCLENAGHAN According to “The Irish News” (5 April 2018) it was reported that this gentleman, an IRA volunteer, was appointed in 2017 to the NI Victims and Survivors Forum, whose function includes helping a government agency, the NI Victims & Survivors Commission, in “understanding the needs of victims and survivors”. It is beyond irony to attempt to get your head round what McClenaghan’s expertise in this area might be. Other forum members were not informed of his PIRA past. And what did the bold Robert say 7 years ago about that? As reported in the “The Irish News” (5 April 2018):“. . . McClenaghan said [in 2011] he was ‘immensely proud’ of having been an IRA member in the mid-70s, during which he learned to use weapons to ‘kill people’ and planted bombs ‘big and small’ in central Belfast . . . he expressed no remorse for any loss he may have inflicted on others” (“The Irish News”, 5 April 2018).If you can endure it, you can listen to bomber McClenaghan and watch his selectively self-justifying blethers in a 36 minute Dutch film “When the war ends” (https://vimeo.com/85810659), released in 2011, that makes no reference whatsoever to the lives lost, and innocent fellow citizens injured, maimed and traumatised, directly or indirectly by his terrorist* brutality, in conjunction with his deluded mates, before he was apprehended and jailed for 12 years in 1976. He was apparently released on licence in 1988, but we have incomplete information about what he then got up to.CONCLUSIONSI am a pacifist. In my opinion, there is never any justification for taking the life of any human being. If you are against capital punishment, as I am, then it’s a straightforward read across to hold that human life is priceless in all circumstances. I’ll let you engage in your “what about” debate with yourself about killing fellow-humans in self-defence, in a “just war”, or by abortion.As for the dirty, deceitful, power-lusting killing spree, admitted by and indulged in by Kehoe, McClenaghan and their deluded mates: this was and remains a salutary example of how not to problem-solve Irish political issues. The fact is that McClenaghan and his mates, and their mirror-image counterparts identifying as British loyalist/unionist in outlook, were led into murderous, criminal acts, as armed pawns in a power game planned, orchestrated and led by so-far unidentified, psychopathic manipulators – the armchair generals – from the secret safety of their anonymous backgrounds. These cold-blooded killers were previously naïve, simple-minded, easily led but essentially ‘good human beings’, before being “radicalized” by the lies and false promises of Irish republican / British loyalist propagandists. They morphed into automaton-like puppets on a real life stage, using explosive munitions and automatic firearms to take the lives, and to destroy the livelihoods of their neighbours, other ‘good human beings’, at massive cost but zero benefit.Over 30+ years from mid-1960’s to late 1990’s, Kehoe, McClenaghan and hundreds of their like-minded psychopathic mates, both in and out of “uniform”, sent over 3,500 fellow-citizens to the slaughter, into the ground decades before their time. For a really convincing demonstration of what Irish / British terrorist (aka political) violence delivered, be prepared to weep while having an extended look at ‘Lost Lives’ (McKitterick et al., 1999/2004). This masterly publication briefly but comprehensively describes the violent circumstances of each of these prematurely ‘lost lives’. Of course the most blatant ‘big lie’ that continues to be spouted day and daily by Irish republican propagandists relates to and underpins their false claim that they had no alternative but to take up arms in the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s against the British state. Anyone who wishes to take the time, will eventually acknowledge, understand and accept that during those decades, Irish terrorism was neither justified nor justifiable as a problem-solving approach to the Irish National Question. I’ll conclude with a relevant sentence or two in response to the question: was PIRA terrorism justified:“No, I don’t believe so. There was a peaceful civil rights movement, it was operating in a country that had a democratic process. In time the inequalities could have been addressed by peaceful protest and the political process. The violence of the IRA only delayed that process and caused untold suffering to both communities.” ( https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Irish-Republican-Army-justified published 2 May 2014 and accessed on 15 April 2018.) REFERENCESMcKitterick, D., Kelters, S., Feeney, B., Thornton, C. and McVea, D. (1999/2004) Lost Lives –the stories of ther men,women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Edinburgh/Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) LtdOxford Dictionary (2018) Terrorism, defined as violence against civilians for political ends. Hence ‘terrorist’*: a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.Accessed online on 13 April 2018. [https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/terrorist]

​SUICIDE IS NO ACCIDENTSuicide is no accident. Think about it. The implication becomes clear: that a cause/effect relationship within the human mind links unbearable psychological pain (Shneidman, 1993) to irreversibly lethal behaviour that kills the pain but that tragically and coincidentally destroys the decision-taking mind. Hence an aeons long search goes on for a General Theory of Suicide, exemplified most recently in the work of O’Connor (2011) and Joiner (2005). I hasten to add that I am not a member of any global search squad. Rather I am interested in understanding the idiosyncratic nature of each lethal event of human self-destruction. For me, and many others, shocked and distressed by family suicide, prevention is no longer possible: we have become survivors of bereavement by suicide. And choices exist, that are inevitable, unavoidable and essential, regarding our response to what has happened. Either, we can invest scarce energy in analysis of the impossible, i.e. how I, and/or others, might have prevented our family suicide event/s, or we might consider, in some systematic and disciplined way, how to deepen our understanding about what happened, not least inter alia to secure some fraction, large or small, of absolution in relation to our catastrophic loss. Understanding suicide is, I would argue, a prerequisite for reducing the incidence of suicide, including its prevention, for example by way of the recent heavily publicised “Zero Suicide” movement: you’ll not easily change what you don’t understand. Some think that ‘suicide prediction skills’ are a logical way ahead for countering suicide. Some say these ‘skills’ involve an awareness of both suicide ‘risk factors’ and counter-suicide ‘protection factors’ and their balanced application in psychotherapeutic work with each suicidal client. And I am sympathetic to the apparently rational nature of this approach. However most suicidologists will not disagree that such an apparent master/servant relationship between an expert therapist and a vulnerable client, may neither fully reflect nor align well with person-centred counselling theory and practice. In what follows I discuss some helping principles for reducing an individual’s suicide impulse by facilitating the individual to understand it and thereby to take control of it. [Note that I do not intend to refer to medical psychiatry nor the DMS nor pharmaceutical pathology in what follows as I am content to possess neither relevant qualifications nor practical knowledge of these esoteric areas.] The CAMS approach seems to be an attempt to situate therapist and client in a relationship of equals. This may also be as close as psychotherapy can get to a self-help, life-saving approach to suicide prevention.REFERENCESJoiner, T. (2005) Why people die by suicide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ PressO’Connor, R.C. (2011) The Integrated Motivational-Volitional Model of Suicidal Behaviour (IMV). Accessed on 18 July 2017 at http://www.suicideresearch.info/the-imvShneidman, E.S. (1993) Suicide as psychache. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. v181:145–147

What has been briefly examined above is the clear contrast that separates NI society’s approach to political murder from its consideration of domestic suicide. Whether there is ever a determined attempt to reduce the existing gulf between the quantum of scarce public, taxpayers’ resources variously deployed in investigating these tragedies remains to be seen. Unlimited public funds appear to be available to investigate the consequences of 30 years of political murder, while comparatively negligible amounts are dedicated to the aftermath of domestic suicide. Currently this latter issue does not feature strongly enough as a discrete element in NI government programmes (Right to Health Campaign, 2016). Local human rights charities, like Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), have had some recent success in highlighting the physical and psychological health needs of potentially thousands of survivors of bereavement by suicide. What remains ‘off the table’ however is energetic strategic action in NI with respect to Edwin Shneidman’s dictum regarding the uniqueness of each suicide death:

““each sad case [of a death by suicide] should be assessed, understood and treated in its own idiosyncratic psychological terms.” (Shneidman, 2001: 203) This represents a lost opportunity for learning about, and enhancing, our understanding of the actualité of human suicide, and how more insightful prevention and reduction strategies might be designed and implemented so as to replace over time our current, largely unsuccessful policies.

​A New Theory of Suicidal BehaviourImagine my surprise when finding yet another theory of suicidal behaviour on offer to add to the existing fifteen or sixteen already available to suicidology. I mention this because unfortunately I’ll not be able to make it to Boston (Harvard Medical School) on 9 December 2016 to hear Tom Joiner deliver his latest insights upon ‘a new theory’. But why ‘surprise’, I hear you say.Well it takes me back to Aristotle’s ‘well-known’ definition of truth: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”[Accessed on 22 Aug 2016 at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/]Further ‘research’ via Dr Google offered the following from ‘Daniel Super, Game Programmer’ on the subject of opinion and truth:“People have many different opinions because they have different life experiences and perspectives. Very little can be said with absolute certainty outside the realm of mathematics. In many things there may be no truth at all. Moral questions cannot be answered definitively for all possible conditions, even the ones that seem obvious like ‘is it immoral to kill another human?’ have notable exceptions in most people's eyes. As for religions, I'm convinced that none of them even remotely approach any sort of truth.”][Accessed on 22 Aug 2016 at https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-have-so-many-different-opinions-Is-there-only-one-truth-to-things].So here’s my argument. I shall not attempt here to delineate any or all 15 or 16 theories about human suicidal behaviour, but you can find out more here (Lester, 1994). I tend towards the view – or it’s my opinion – that each act of suicidal behaviour, properly defined, is unique. The exhaustive efforts by suicidology to categorise, classify, typify, generalise, compare, contrast and/or rationalise human suicide behaviour represents, in my opinion, mission impossible. That is not to say that a journal article by David Lester (1994) offering a method for studying the lives of those deceased by suicide by application of multiple theories of suicide was not a more than useful exercise. It does make interesting reading.Ten years on, Leenaars’ (2004) important, 460 page text offered additional insights into understanding suicide that (he argued) are essential for psychotherapists (and others) working in suicide prevention. On his first page, he stressed the uniqueness of each human being: “We must do justice to the fascinating individuality of each person [that] is humankind’s complexity . . . this is as true for suicide as for any behaviour. Suicide is complex.” (Leenaars, 1994: 1). Shneidman (1985) agreed, arguing that “each suicide is an idiosyncratic event . . . there are no universals, absolutes or ‘alls’ ” (Shneidman, 1985: 121). “To understand what [suicidal behaviour] is about, one has to know the problem that [suicide] was intended to solve” (Shneidman, 1985: 129). ReferencesHarvard Medical School (2016) Assessing and treating self-destructive behaviours. Two day course, Dec 9-10 2016. Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel. Boston, MassachusettsLeenaars, A.A. (2004) Psychotherapy with suicidal people: a person-centred approach. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, LtdLester, D. (1994) Research Note: A comparison of 15 theories of suicide. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour, 24(1), Spring 1994Shneidman, E.S. (1985) Definition of Suicide. New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc.

​DEATH: SUICIDE v MURDER A few nights ago, in bed, I made the effort to get up, find a pen and paper and write down some thoughts about death, murder and suicide.Recently close to where I live in Belfast, a 91 year old woman, just returning from the Post Office having collected her state pension, was assaulted on the street by a criminal thug and robbed as she arrived home. I believe that this unfortunate, innocent, fellow citizen has survived after being hospitalised but clearly her sense of herself, her personal safety and integrity are “changed utterly” and negatively by her experience. Police afterwards issued a leaflet to folks in our neighbourhood appealing for information, presumably not unrelated to our local streets being included in a voluntary crime prevention scheme called “Neighbourhood Watch”. I hope that the above-mentioned cowardly miscreant is rapidly identified and removed from society until he learns some manners.Back to death, murder and suicide. Death is “the only certainty” for humans, as for all forms of mortal life – cell, plant, animal and human. Let’s just agree that the life cycle represents “an iron law”, unavoidable and indisputable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law) for my garden’s daffodils, as for my late pet dog, Basil, as well as for everyone, including me and you, good reader, who has lived, is living or will live on planet Earth. We’ll leave for the time being extraterrestrial life (per Webster-Merriam “coming from or existing outside the planet Earth” - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extraterrestrial).I’ll try to shorten this up.Murder, across the globe, is regarded as a crime. The saga of Cain and Abel resonates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel). Each human death is a murder if and when directly attributed to the intentional actions of another or per Dr Google: “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another” (https://www.google.co.uk/#q=murder). And each such death is idiosyncratic. It is investigated, vigorously or otherwise, by governmental agencies seeking to identify the culprit. Lessons are learned or at least attempted by relevant media publicity. As for those left to grieve the loss through murder of a loved one, states generally accept their duty to bereaved citizens to ameliorate their loss by compensation, and, in some cases psychological support in the aftermath. In Northern Ireland, the Victims Support organisation provides this service:“Victim Support NI is a charity supporting people affected by crime. We offer a free and confidential service, whether or not a crime has been reported and regardless of how long ago the event took place. We are an independent organisation - not part of the police, courts or any other criminal justice agency.” (http://www.victimsupportni.co.uk/)SUICIDE NOT A CRIMESo that’s alright then. Now let’s look at death by suicide. Here since 1966, suicide is no longer a crime:“The Suicide Act 1961 (9 & 10 Eliz 2 c 60) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It decriminalized the act of suicide in England and Wales so that those who failed in the attempt to kill themselves would no longer be prosecuted.The text of sections 1 and 2 of this Act was enacted verbatim for Northern Ireland by sections 12 and 13 of the Criminal Justice Act (Northern Ireland) 1966. The Act did not apply to Scotland, as suicide was never an offence under Scots Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Act_1961).In the Irish Republic (variously Republic of Ireland, Ireland, The South) the crime of suicide lasted for over a further quarter century until 1993:The Criminal Law (Suicide) Act, 1993 at section 2 provides: (1) Suicide shall cease to be a crime (http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irishancestors/Law/Suicide.html).” Just like that – yesterday a crime alongside murder, viz. self-murder, but today not so. Reading the parliamentary debates (Westminster, Stormont, Leinster House – Ireland) leading up to legislative changes from 1961 to 1993 is revealing indeed. More on that may (DV) feature in a later blog, including the recent awakening in UK / Ireland of arguments in favour of legalisation of a so-called “assisted death” movement. Ironical indeed, given our national propensity to ‘assist death’ for political (i.e. power seeking) purposes in Ireland most recently for over 30 years from 1966.SUICIDE v MURDERFor today, I’ll simply contrast our society’s treatment of suicide with that of murder. Clearly each suicide is idiosyncratic in nature, like any other death event. Police services, representing state resources, refer to deaths by suicide as having “no suspicious circumstances”, in other words, no crime. However, suicidology (“the scientific study of suicidal behaviour and suicide prevention” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicidology) has tended to focus upon prevention, paying most of its attention to what are known as “suicide rates”, then to the attributes of those fellow-humans deceased by apparent suicide, and finally to supposed cause/effect relations between a ‘do nothing’ approach and the material / psychological elements of ‘suicide prevention’ strategies. Unfortunately, psychological autopsy, the method most often relied upon in related research, is deeply flawed:“. . . as a diagnostic tool psychological autopsies should now be abandoned. Instead, we recommend qualitative approaches focusing on the understanding of suicide beyond mental disorders, where narratives from a relatively high number of informants around each suicide are systematically analyzed in terms of the informants’ relationships with the deceased (Hjelmeland et al., Death Studies, 36: 605–626, 2012).SUICIDE RATESThe incidence of death by suicide, represented in statistics, is as reliable as the human, bureaucratic recording systems that generate them. Making comparisons across countries based upon “suicide rates” may represent a waste of time and effort:Incidence of suicide tends to be under-reported due to both religious and social pressures . . . and possibly completely unreported in some areas. Since the data might be skewed, comparing suicide rates between nations is statistically unsound. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate).GENERALISING SUICIDEOne of the dominant stupidities of suicidology is its reliance upon comparisons, its search for commonalities, and its quest to generalise causes of suicide – most culpably represented in the ludicrous notion that all suicides are rooted in mental illness/disorder/disease. I tend to share Heidi Hjelmeland et al’s view that suicidology needs a paradigmatic shift from quantitative approaches (i.e. counting them) to “qualitative approaches focusing on the understanding of suicide beyond mental disorders” (cited above).EACH SUICIDE IS UNIQUEEach suicide needs investigated by the state “as if” it was a murder, albeit self-murder. Only when each citizen, from birth to death, is valued equally in social systems that render ‘profit’ below ‘people’, will our society begin the journey towards arriving at a deeper understanding of the human behaviour called suicide. This may not happen or even begin to happen anytime soon. Still Carroll and McCann (People before Profit Party) were recently elected to our local legislature. So don’t give up . . . . never give up.

Since July 2015 I've attended several CPD meetings to meet professional accreditation criteria. Most recently, on 11 Nov 2015, I participated in a 'free' seminar organised by Contact, a N Ireland charity that administers a 24 hour telephone help-line - Lifeline - for the vulnerable and/or at risk of suicide. If you're familiar with the Samaritans listening organisation, Lifeline listens, but also seeks with the caller's informed consent and when judged appropriate, to engage in a therapeutic mode. A Lifeline telephone counsellor may offer face-to-face counselling, by a colleague, that is described as 'wraparound'. In short, a Lifeline counsellor may become an available, accessible provider of brief family therapy (up to six sessions). I'm unsure of Contact's training syllabus, but Lifeline's approach appears to be influenced somewhat by David Jobes's Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) model described as "a collaborative . . . approach to assessing and managing suicidal risk [that emphasises] individual differences in treating suicidal clients [accepting] that there is 'not a one size fits all way of understanding all suicidal people' ”. (www.psychalive.org). You can get much more about this approach via the afore-mentioned website.

One serious issue for therapists in "helping people at risk of suicide" is the quality and depth of their informed compassionate empathy, including aptitude, education/qualifications, training and effective hands-on experience. I'd be interested to learn from colleagues about how well they feel that they meet these criteria - I would argue they're necessary but perhaps not sufficient - for working effectively with souls at risk of self destruction. Why not sufficient? For the most obvious yet largely intractable of factors: establishing connection with these almost invariably isolated souls who often suffer unbearably yet in silence behind a mask of 'normality'.

Helping theory has demonstrated beyond any doubt that I cannot help a fellow human without establishing and maintaining an effective therapeutic relationship. I recommend the late Dr Israel Orbach's approach (article available on request from me or your local library) "Therapeutic empathy with the suicidal wish: Principles of therapy with suicidal individuals. Israel Orbach. American Journal of Psychotherapy; 2001; 55, 2; 166-184. Read what Dr Orbach says about his 'uncompromised confrontation of self-destructiveness' and how you can learn to work compassionately and more effectively with the client at serious risk.

One final point re the November 2015 Contact seminar. One attendee describing himself as a psychiatrist, stressed the individualistic - I would use the term idiosyncratic - nature of human suicidality, defined as 'tendency towards intentional self-destruction'. Each of us is a unique representation of the species, and worthy of inestimable respect as such.

I plan to complete and submit the lengthy consultation document on the future of the Lifeline service to the DHSSPSNI. At the outset, I cannot envisage the NI Ambulance Service as a suicide prevention organisation. Further, my view is that bottom line GB government austerity considerations appear to hover like a thunderstorm over the current Contact-managed, much admired, effective and efficient life-saving Lifeline service. I shall argue accordingly in my submission.

YOU WANT TO HELP? THEN GET THE LIFELINE CONSULTATION DOCUMENT COMPLETED AND SUBMITTED IN TIME - BY THURSDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2015 LATEST.

Just a brief note about one 'death by suicide' known to me that has again come to my mind in recent days. In this case a long past, seriously abusive experience may have been an early initiator, a primary generator, a first cause that years later killed a good man long before his time. I say 'may' because there's no way directly and/or conclusively to attribute a 'cause/effect' relationship between this historical abuse and his self-destructive behaviour. And his death was quite unexpected and 'out-of-the-blue'.

Imagine that you, a young 'black' man, aged about 16 years, one of a family of nine, live peacefully, legally and respectfully in a 'white'-dominated lower middle-class UK neighbourhood. You are the youngest of seven siblings, six boys and one girl. Because you are 'black' you, like your siblings, go to a 'faith' school across town wearing your school uniform. Each school-day, you walk 'against the traffic' as it were, to a bus stop 400 metres away while local youths, alighting from a bus, walk from an adjacent bus stop past you en route to a 'state' school nearby. Similarly, you complete your return journey home 'against the traffic' as 'state' school students hurry past you en route to their bus.

Your older brothers and sister have never experienced any difficulty en route to or from their 'faith' school other than the effort to catch a bus to town in time to reach class or to get home in good time. In any case, by this time, all your siblings have 'left home' and you live with your now elderly parents.

However, one day in the early 1970's without warning, on your way home after stepping off the bus and almost home, you are attacked and seriously assaulted by unidentified person/s. Passers-by help you home. The assailants are not identified but are described as being state school students by way of their distinctive school uniform.For unknown reasons, police are not informed about this crime by the 'Samaritans' nor by your family.

A few years before the incident, a serious, violent, long-lasting (1966-1998) political conflict had erupted in the UK region where you lived . Your family members have never been involved in anything unlawful - indeed several of your relatives have served with honour in local and overseas state police services. Nor are they actively 'political' other than in voting in state elections.

During your remaining school-days and until you acquire a motorcycle and attend university, you are 'escorted' by your father or a sibling or a friendly neighbour to your school bus. On your return journey, you alight from your bus early and stay in a friend's house (the H family) until you are again escorted home.

Although the incident was reported by phone shortly after the event by one of your siblings to a senior school staff member (unidentified, refusing to give his name) this person dismissed the incident, noting that as it allegedly took place away from the school campus, involved unidentified assailants, and was not (yet) reported to police, nothing could or would be done by the school. This was stated defensively and without any expression of sympathy for the injured person.

AFTERMATH

About 15 years later, the victim of this assault died by suicide. It's clear to me, based on my own detailed knowledge of the victim, his family, the local neighbourhood and a then current, poisonous lawlessness feeding off a 'low risk of detection', that this assault was carried out by aggressive, criminal bigots. The assaulted person would have been identified to his bigoted assailants as 'one of them' (a hated minority 'black' outsider) by his school uniform.Since the victim was on his own, these cowards were able to carry out their dirty, unprovoked assault without fear of detection or redress.

I think about this unsolved crime often. I deeply regret that it may well have been an unfair, unjust, illegal 'lighting of a fuse' that created at least a contextual element for the catastrophic, personal explosion that killed an innocent man years later.

I wish that I had been able to do more at the time of the assault and afterwards. Requiesquat in pace (1989).

I wanted to note further thoughts about health, physical health and mental health in particular the boundaries that separate the latter two. Currently these 'Chinese walls' are often noted by politicians and media commentators, some of whom are seeking more UK state funding for 'mental health' as distinct from 'physical health'. It seems everyone knows that a broken leg is a 'physical health' matter with a designated diagnosis, treatment, prognosis. But 'a broken mind'?

Just to 'check it out' I googled 'healing a broken mind' and found a sad chronicle on the 'time for change' website (see above) by 'Lucy', Oct. 2012, detailing her six year 'battle' with anxiety and panic attacks. Happily Lucy concludes "I'm having psychotherapy,which is really helping, and I plan to take as much time as I need to relax and let my nervous system recover".

One can only wonder, with regret, about the up to six years of pain and discomfort seemingly endured by Lucy between onset and access to help. I mean: what is it that stops the Lucys of this world from seeking help, wherever it may be found, as soon as or perhaps well before the pain becomes unbearable. Just like they do when they 'break a leg'. It's not as if counselling and psychotherapy is not widely available via NHS, GPs, EAPs, community and voluntary organisations and private practitioners. The available quality may range from less than poor to quite excellent but we know beyond a doubt that the client/therapist relationship determines outcomes. Don't we all know that by now?

A final comment: when we use the term 'physical illness' we know it's meaningless without stating its locus, its effect on 'normal' functioning and/or behaviour, etc. Not so for 'mental illness'. Four portmanteau terms mental health, mental illness, mental disease, and mental disorder are widely deployed by those who should know better, often without any descriptors or further explanation. Consumers of these bare, vague, non-specific terms, viz. students, readers, electors, voters, audiences, and ultimately the general public are left to apply their own frequently threadbare, factually deficient definitions: why? Could it be those old, cob-webbed, hackneyed silencers and stultifiers of meaning, knowledge and wisdom viz. stigma, taboo and fear of ridicule.

Ideally our health and well-being, individually and collectively should be capable of being regarded, understood, maintained and where necessary enhanced in a holistic manner. For now that's some way off.

Regrettably I was diverted from updating this blog by ridiculous events, during June 2014-Mar 2015, that were outside my immediate control but which I had to grasp by the throat, address and dispose of, with the sterling support of friends/comrades, particularly M. This took up far too much of my time and energy. Also recently (Feb-April 2015) I suffered two sudden bereavements - one human, one canine. Each death had a crunching effect upon me, initially lowering my mood and leaving me numb for several weeks. Indeed, I remain somewhat altered and reduced although I'm learning to live as well as I can with these serious detachments.One does not 'recover' from loss, one adjusts to a diminished present and to a related, attenuated future.

For a couple of months past I have begun (tentatively and humbly) but with a view to eventual publication on this website or by way of a commercial publisher, to document my personal perspectives (1982-2015) on suicide and suicidology. Coincidentally subtle changes in my physical health have signalled memento mori. I'm not afraid to acknowledge the truth, the unavoidable reality of the human life-cycle: beginning, growth, maturity, decline, end. Rather I know that each day lived has reduced my 'allotted span' by one and this, hopefully encourages me to 'get the finger out' and to reach out towards my goal/s. Dag Hammarskjold's 'Markings'(1964) include his insightful, helpful aspiration: "Tomorrow we shall meet, death and I - and he shall thrust his sword into one who is wide awake'. Deo volente.

I am still pondering a further (second) meeting of the Belfast Centre for Study of Suicide (BCSS) - the initial gathering was in Aug 2013, and related documents are available on site. And perhaps another (third) local tv-online interview with my friend Rowan Hand in Newry, Co Down. But echoing in my head are the gently challenging remarks of my good friend and long-term adviser W - 'Maybe it's not the right time for you' - in other words the BCSS is either premature or misdirected or both. In the meantime I have enquired about legal protocols,if any, regarding using the name SuicidologyNI as a more convenient, portmanteau title for the Centre that encapsulates the principal objective of our work - the study of suicide, including suicide prevention, in Northern Ireland.

I try to respond albeit selectively to online discussions about suicide especially when I am able to refute as robustly as possible the facile, misleading and scaremongering mantra 'mental disease and suicide are cause and effect' that underpins much published suicidology research. I recently (May 2015) wrote to a local print newspaper, that had published some of my earlier articles/letters, about a speculative 'opinion' piece about suicide that I considered misleading. My letter was not published and so I plan to upload it to this site shortly. This is yet another reason for writing about, and publishing as widely as possible, my personal perspectives in order not to 'hide my light under a bushel'.